Making Not Taking Culture: practice purpose politics
Making Not Taking Culture: practice purpose politics
May 7-10, Montreal, QC, Canada
Uncommon Senses V:
Sensing the Social, the Environmental, and Across the Arts and Sciences
Concordia University, Montreal, QC.
2.5.7 Jennifer Biddle (UNSW), Making Not Taking Culture Panel 1: concordia-ca.zoom.us/j/88518059969
Thursday, 16h00-17h30 on-line (see above link)
Paper 1: Jennifer Biddle/Tess Lea Introduction to Panel (3 Session/2 Days)
Paper 2: Cheryl L’Hirondelle
Paper 3: Sudiipta Dowsett and Millina Terblanche aka aMillz the First
2.6.3 Jennifer Biddle (UNSW), Making Not Taking Culture Panel 2: concordia-ca.zoom.us/j/87533244111
Thursday, 18h00-19h30 on-line
Paper 4: Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu and Marc Peckham
Paper 5: Noramin Farid, Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain
Paper 6: Panel Discussion (all presenters) + Q&A
3.5.9 Jennifer Biddle (UNSW), Making Not Taking Culture Panel 3: : concordia-ca.zoom.us/j/89887605197
Friday, 16h00-17h30 on-line
Paper 7: Jennifer Biddle
Paper 8: Laura McLaughlin
Paper 9: Tess Lea
Papers/Abstracts/Bios
PANEL 1
Paper 1: Introduction to Panel: Making not Taking culture: practice, purpose, politics
This panel (9-papers, 2-days), is on new arts engaged platforms and cultural formations taking shape exploring radical practice and sensory methodologies. Bringing together key practitioners and community projects in the field, the panel considers what uniquely collective, community based, embodied forms of practice do in post-documentary forms of truth telling, participation and survival. Such instigations figure ways of doing and being and making that materialise sedimentation and generate value beyond the neoliberal and market driven, from understories to overstories, ‘low’ tech video to machine-based interfaces, VR hyperreals to place-based performance; language and archival activations, curatorial architecture and infrastructural interventions. Taking shape against increasing commodified versions of experience or what Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu calls the ‘take-away’ of extractivist logics, our panel is interested in complex and vital capacities of somatic and aesthetic labour, scale and pace, post-growth and counter-policies, environmental and public sites, including writing and speculative ethnography in the work of practice to mobilise force, effect and collectivise agency. Against an assumption of a singular audience, body individual or unilineal media trajectory, the focus in this forum is on inequity, divergence and the parallax in thinking with practice, purpose and politics.
Paper 2:
Author: Cheryl L’Hirondelle
Title: ēmihkwānisak ohci (for the spoons)
We form attachments to our belongings. They become transactive memory devices. Select ‘belongings’ from within nēhiyaw-itāpisinowin (Cree ontology) are part of our ‘bundles’ that travel through life with us and play an important role as they ‘keep’ memories, and thus, they perform animate functions. However, not every ‘thing’ is a ‘belonging’ or part of a ‘bundle’; some may be referred more appropriately to as apacihcikana (useful devices) or, in the common vernacular, known as objects or things.
ēmihkwānisak ohci (for the spoons) is a recent family-engaged project that manifests as an Augmented Reality (AR) 3D object, accompanied by binaural audio stories from myself and three other first cousins (plus other younger relatives as listeners). The ‘belonging’ depicted is imbued with important historical provenance, and the contemporary stories help to both frame the multigenerational, multidimensional realities of Indigeneity within my family and as examples of the memories the belonging is keeping.
Keywords: transactive, belongings, intergenerational, bundles
Paper 3:
Authors: Sudiipta Dowsett and Millina Terblanche aka aMillz the First
Title: Cypher as method: collective rap sessions as embodied co-reflective aesthetic practice beyond analysis
Abstract:
This paper explores rap as embodied practice, moving beyond the predominant focus on its end product to examine the ethics and transformative potential of Hip Hop-as-arts-based research methods. Drawing on collaborative sessions with South African Hip Hop artists, we argue that rap collaboration within research contexts fosters a participatory framework, where knowledge is jointly produced and ethically negotiated with a potential to shift power dynamics and produce a particular type of embodied solidarity. This paper presents findings from a co-designed project using the Hip Hop cypher-as-method to collectively explore the political capacities of Hip Hop for women artists in the isiXhosa-speaking township of Khayelitsha, South Africa. An expanded notion of the cypher (Spady et al 2006) as collectively producing Hip Hop-based knowledge is explored as a method for building solidarity and safe spaces for women within a male-dominated culture. The paper provides background on the development of Rebel Sistah Cypher, including sexism in the local Hip Hop scene and in activist collectives, before describing the uses of the cypher as an activist tool and as an arts-based method. The presentation includes a song produced by the project called Imbokodo Rise which represents what Imani Kai Johnson (2014) terms “badass femininity”.
Key Words: Embodied methods; Hip Hop; Gender; South Africa
PANEL 2
Paper 1 Authors: Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu and Marc Peckham
Title: Ngurra Kurlu (HOME): Creating an embodied understanding of desert culture through art
Abstract:
Prof Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu and his 90 year old father Jerry Jangala Patrick are fully initiated First Nations Elders from the remote Warlpiri community of Lajamanu in the Central Desert of Australia. Alongside a 20-year history of creating the extraordinary large scale community performance event of Milpirri in collaboration with Tracks Dance Company for his remote community of 900 people, while also experiencing cultural loss of Elders and sacred knowledge at a devastating scale, Wanta had an increasingly urgent drive to share the importance of First Nations culture with wider Australia, beyond Warlpiri borders. The provocation was: How could one invite a distant urban audience into an embodied felt sense of a First Nations culture and worldview, across a seemingly insurmountable gap of distance, culture and language? This presentation introduces the Ngurra Kurlu (HOME) artwork, created by Wanta and Jerry in collaboration with award-winning music producer Marc Peckham, with whom they share a creative relationship spanning 14 years. Blending the sensory experiences of cinema, music, song, and intimate conversation, Ngurra Kurlu (HOME) explores the charged intersection of culture, politics and humanity in a quest for yapa and kardiya to re-imagine a post-colonial future together. The presentation includes screening of a trailer for the project.
Key words: First Nations art and new media; Warlpiri; Place-based belonging; Ngurra Kurlu (Home)
Paper 2:
Authors: Noramin Farid, Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain
Title: Aliens who walked on land and under sea— embodying the survivance, surrealism and South-South allyship of the north west Australian pearl shell industry 1860s–1960s
Abstract: This paper will identify the multi-modal sensory practices engaged in the making of Mutiara (2023), an intermedial dance work created in Yawuru land and sea Country, Broome, in remote north Western Australia. Mutiara takes 1860’s-1960s as a 100 year window to bring attention to the inhuman labour conditions, racist pseudo-science and brutal government policies that forged Broome’s fabled pearl shell industry. The production was co-created by members of Marrugeku, a Broome based Indigenous governed-intercultural performance company, in collaboration with guest artists of Singaporean and Australian Malay diasporas. Mutiara’s co-choreographers and dancers Dalisa Pigram (Yawuru/Bardi/Malay Filipina) and Noramin Farid (Malay-Singaporean) and dramaturg Rachael Swain (Anglo-settler) will share insights into the intergenerational, improvisational and intermedial processes applied in the making of Mutiara. Through case studies, images and documentation they will unpack how relational, community informed approaches enabled the experimental somatic, visual and conceptual investigations to embody and stage unsung Indigenous-Malay allyships of the global South.
Keywords: Dance, Malay, intercultural, choreographic-truth telling
Paper 3:
Authors: All Panel Presenters
Title: Making not Taking Culture: A panel discussion with presenters + Q&A.
PANEL 3
Paper 1:
Author: Jennifer Loureide Biddle
Title: Live wire and speculative ethnography
Abstract: This is a new work of creative non-fiction as an experiment in speculative writing, attention and attestation. My interest is in the heritage and circulation of affect as techno-electric current and currency in writing a certain history of the present, tracking a somatic legacy of ECT (Electroconvulsive therapy) as embodied female inheritance. Following Donna Haraway, Suzanne Kite and others, my concern is the inextricable entanglement of bodies with technology and with Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, the making and binding of gendered and racialized bodies to public health hierarchies of inequity, care and modes of endurance. My interest here, as elsewhere, is in how ethnographic writing can serve as radical empiricism; how to document an amnesia and violence of histories built upon affective regulatory regimes, machines and an unarchivable of the existential; to stage set and bring to life a circuitry of live wire in what Anand Pandian calls a ‘dark anthropology of uneasy times’ in the ongoing pressing control of women’s lives, health and reproduction today.
Key Words: Radical empiricism; experimental ethnography; gender, technology, aesthetics.
Paper 2:
Author: Laura McLaughlin
Title: The felt sense of enemy others: interoceptive approaches to polarised relations in the Western USA
Abstract: Working with people engaged in a number of body-oriented mindfulness practices, this paper will explore people’s felt sense of ‘enemy’ others, as well as people’s bodily labours to (at times) overcome—or even metabolise—resistance to such others. Working with practitioners largely based in the Western USA operating within broader cultural formations centred on the development of interoceptive awareness to connect across difference, this paper looks at the possibilities and limits of sensory awareness for addressing polarisation and instances of relational stalemates. With a particular attention to participants’ feelings of disgust, outrage, and resistance, I discuss practitioners’ felt sense of the ‘enemy’, including the practices, concepts and intentions, and broader community values that play a part in being interested (or not) in attending to one’s sense of ‘enemy’ others, rather than—or in addition to—contact with the person themselves. Finally, I offer some initial considerations of what such practices have meant for practitioners’ relations in the world, including not only instances of radical inequity of bodily labour, sorrows, and at times misplaced hopes, but also moments of just-possible connections and of softening within relations of ongoing disagreement.
Keywords: sensory relations, hope, sorrow, enemies, engagement
Paper 3:
Author: Tess Lea
Title: Policy ecology, infrastructure and endurance
Abstract: Buried within many descriptions of anthropogenic apocalypse, in accounts of what an unchecked desire for extractive existence has imperilled beyond return, lie two key concepts: 1. Indigenous lifeworlds represent an alternative, an otherwise, that teaches us how to live more attuned to, more in harmony with, in good relations with, the non-human universe; and 2. The state needs to determine the policies and funding inducements and fines to reroute our technocapital regimes into eco-friendly, ‘sustainable’, modes and provide a decent blueprint for action. If written as a genuflection, the first concept positions Indigenous people as mnemonics for a possible otherwise, remaining in imaginations, living in margins, without infrastructural needs. In the second framing, Indigenous people disappear within metropolitan imaginaries, while densely populated settlements continue to be nourished from margins albeit through acts of kindness and repair. In both cases, a form of ‘make it good for everyone without sacrifice’ becomes a ‘making, not taking’ unworldliness. To better craft a hyper-real representation of science-art co-dependencies, this essay takes poetics into the innards of global extractivism. Using a framing of policy ecology, I revisit the ugliness of concrete and infrastructure, the messiness of policy and politics, to tether hope with a pragmatics of existence.
Key Words: Policy ecology, infrastructure, climate change, cultural politics
Bios
Cheryl L’Hirondelle (www.cheryllhirondelle.com) is the recipient of two imagineNATIVE New Media Awards (2005, 2006), two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (2006, 2007) and she is a recipient of the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art. She holds a Master’s degree in Design from OCAD University’s Inclusive Design program (2015). L’Hirondelle is Director of Miyoh Music Inc., a small Indigenous niche music publishing company and record label.
Prof Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu: Creative Director of Milpirri. He is an Indigenous Knowledge Institute Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He has held an ARC Discovery Indigenous Award with the School of Music, ANU, and is on the Steering Committee for the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia. Wanta’s passion is the reinvigoration of Warlpiri culture with a vision to share his deep cultural knowledge with wider Australia and beyond.
Marc Peckham: Award-winning music producer, Marc has worked with First Nations communities across Australia on music and culture projects for over 25 years, to strengthen, preserve and reinvigorate First Nations knowledge and amplify First Nations voices. He most recently worked on Groote Eylandt as Music and Cultural Lead of the Preserving Culture department of Anindilyakwa Land Council, winning an award as co-writer of the NT Song of the Year.
D Sudiipta Dowsett is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Research Fellow at the Ethnographic Media Lab, Big Anxiety Research Centre, UNSW Art & Design, Australia. Her research explores the decolonial capacities of Hip Hop as embodied practice in South Africa and Australia, highlighting its critical role in maintaining and revitalising Indigenous Ancestral modes of vocality and being. With a strong commitment to collaborative, decolonial and co-designed methods her work seeks to build resources and capacity for community-led futures.
illiha Terblanche aka Millz the First is an Eastern Cape born Rapper and activist now living in Cape Town’s biggest township, Khayelitsha. Her music seeks to inspire, educate and organize all working-class people living in all townships. She has travelled through African countries like Angola, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Namibia and recently toured Europe performing and engaging and working with activist groups and organisations through songs, workshops, and recording music. She has performed in Berlin, Hamburg, Lyon and Paris. Her favourite quote is “if it doesn’t build, it’s not Hip Hop.”
Noramin Farid (Soultari) is a Singaporean choreographer, arts educator, and maritime Southeast Asian performing arts researcher. A recipient of the 2017 Singapore Youth Award and the 2018 India-ASEAN Youth Awards, Amin holds a PhD in Drama, Theatre and Dance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is a Visiting Research Fellow in Universiti Malaya’s Faculty of Creative Arts. He is also the co-founder of a youth dance organisation, DIAN Dancers; the founding member of Arki-Gen, a group promoting discourse and research about Southeast Asian performing arts as well as Ruai Kolektif, a collective based in Malaysia focused on promoting awareness of cultures in Borneo.
Dalisa Pigram is a Yawuru/Bardi woman born and raised in Broome, north western Australia. Co-Artistic Director of Marrugeku together with Rachael Swain, Dalisa is a dancer and choreographer and has been a co-devising artist on all Marrugeku productions. Dalisa is a Yawuru language teacher and is committed to the maintenance of Indigenous language and culture through arts and education working with and for her community. Dalisa is co-editor of Marrugeku: Telling That Story: 25 Years of Trans-Indigenous and Intercultural exchange (Performance Research, 2021).
Rachael Swain is an Anglo settler artist-researcher, born in Aotearoa/New Zealand and living on Gadigal Land, Sydney. She is a director and dramaturg of intercultural and intermedial dance and theatre and a performance researcher and scholar. Rachael is a founding member and Co-Artistic Director of Marrugeku with Dalisa Pigram. She is author of Dance in Contested Land: New Intercultural Dramaturgies (Palgrave, 2020) and co-editor of Marrugeku: Telling That Story: 25 Years of Trans-Indigenous and Intercultural exchange (Performance Research, 2021). She is a Future Fellow at UNSW, Sydney.
Jennifer Loureide Biddle is founding Director emLAB (The Ethnographic Media Lab) unsw.to/emlab BARC, UNSW Art, Design and Architecture, and Gough Whitlam and Malcom Fraser Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University (2023-2024).
Dr Laura McLaughlin is an anthropologist with expertise in both ethnographic illustration and more-than-human eco-feminist approaches. Her most recent book, Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness: The Contradictions of Care in Conservation Practice (2024, MIT Press) combines poetic insights and care-full illustrations to rethink what it might mean to care in more responsive ways, including whether it is possible to kill with kindness in this rapidly changing and conflicting world. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at Macquarie University
Professor Tess Lea is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Dean, School of Communications, Society and Culture, Macquarie University, Australia. Her research explores infrastructure, sewer pipes, roads, housing, and policy, as a means of exploring modes of existence in extractive worlds